Nestled between the metal piping and glistening tiled surfaces of Ole Hansen’s smoked salmon factory is a piano. He plays it to relax.
The object seems out of place in its more clinical surroundings but then again Ole’s little smokehouse, Hansen and Lydersen, is a curious mix of the absurdly quaint and eccentrically efficient.
Occupying the cubbyhole of an old boiler room in Stoke Newington, the Hansen and Lydersen factory is a labour of love, begun in 2009 and ever-evolving. It was built entirely by hand by 31-year-old Ole, a six-foot-something Norwegian who seems incongruously large beside the tiny makeshift building where he spends his days.
The old boiler room – which cost Ole just £300 to covert – used to heat the studios where the Norwegian lived and worked as an art student when he first moved to London seven years ago.
“The smoking chamber is my grandfather’s design so it was built with low-tech materials,” explains Ole, who is dressed in leather boots and beige knitwear.
“My grandfather wasn’t alive when I started building it, so I couldn’t ask him for advice, but my mother remembers the taste of his salmon very well and she’s been helping me out, trying to get it perfect. My grandfather Lydersen and my great-grandfather both smoked salmon.”
Ole, who is scathing about profit-driven, mass-producing businesses, is still smoking the same way his grandfather did 70 years ago, using his own unique blend of juniper and beech wood.
“Beech wood is beautiful,” he says. “It’s really subtle and sweet, and then juniper is the poetry of the forest… It doesn’t overpower the salmon, it just gives it a tiny bit of forest. It’s like a whole journey of taste.”
While Ole’s methods might be traditional however, his boiler-room factory is a far cry from the Norwegian forest where his grandfather used to smoke his salmon for 12 to 14 hours at a time.
But the former “sound artist” says east London is the perfect location for salmon-smoking. “I think the best thing about setting up a business in Hackney is that you are in Hackney.
“People are very open-minded here and there’s just so much stuff happening that you kind of bubble over a little bit sometimes with excitement. I had no idea that there was a food movement in Hackney at all, I was sort of oblivious to that.”
Ole made the jump from art to fish after struggling to find proper smoked salmon in the capital. “One of the reasons I set up this salmon thing was that I was missing the product,” says Ole. “As an ex-pat, I couldn’t find good-quality smoked salmon and I thought, these guys are missing out on something.”
And he argues that setting up the smokehouse was a natural progression from his work as a sound artist. “There are a lot of similarities between being an artisan and art in general. It’s very much about trying to understand one thing and digging down into the material.
“It’s about creating something that stimulates your senses. I’m doing something here that I am hoping will pleasure someone, that someone will enjoy.”
Ole initially intended to source all of his materials from Norway but now imports his beech wood from Germany and salmon from the Faroe Islands.
He justifies this decision, saying: “The recipe itself is from Norway and from a marketing perspective it would have been much easier for me to say this is a Norwegian salmon, but I can’t lie and say I have found the best fish in Norway because I haven’t, I found it in the Faroe Islands.
“The farming of it is done with integrity, with family values and the sustainability of fish farming in mind.”
After more than two years of smoking fish in Hackney, Ole still refuses to spend a single penny on advertising and relies solely on word-of-mouth recommendations to attract customers. But though this strategy has clearly paid off, there is only one person’s opinion Ole really cares about.
He says: “My Mum is proud that I am doing something that suits the world and makes people happy. I am doing something that is honest and bettering people’s life in terms of food.
“Think what the world would be like if everyone did that.”
[…] Salmon-smoking flourishes in Stoke Newington […]